Friday, July 29

My son loves visiting museums. One of his favorites is the National Museum of Natural History. We almost always visit the bird exhibit first. He adores the winged creatures.

For some reason, or perhaps many, this permanent exhibition fills me with sweet nostalgia. I remember my beloved grandparents and their magical home on Ellicott Street. Childhood memories begin to bloom around these silently still feathered friends behind glass.

I am receiving a crystal clear message and I am finally free to listen and respond...

Thursday, July 28

“At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.” - Isabel Allende

Thursday, July 21

"I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again."

- Anais Nin

a playful moment captured by my Latin Lover...my impromptu pillow is a mixed media on canvas...

Wednesday, July 20

"Under the tutelage of Wild Woman we reclaim the ancient, the intuitive, and the passionate. When our lives reflect hers, we act cohesively. We carry through, or learn to if we don't already know how. We take the steps to make our ideas manifest in the world. We regain focus when we lose it, attend to personal rhythms, draw closer to friends and mates who are in accord with wildish and integral rhythms. We choose relationships that nurture our creative and instinctive lives. We reach our to nurture others. And we are willing to teach receptive mates about wildish rhythms if need be.

But there is another aspect to mastery, and that is dealing with what can only be called women's rage. The release of that rage is required. Once women remember the origins of their rage, they feel they may never stop grinding their teeth. Ironically, we also feel very anxious to disperse our rage, for it feels distressing and noxious. We wish to hurry up and do away with it.

But repressing it will not work. It is like trying to put fire into a burlap bag. Neither is it good to scald ourselves or someone else with it. So there we are holding a powerful emotion that we feel came upon us unbidden. It is a little like toxic waste; there it is, no one wants it, but there are few disposal areas for it. One has to travel far in order to find a burial ground...

...All emotion, even rage, carries knowledge, insight, what some call enlightenment. Our rage can, for a time, become teacher...a thing not to be rid of so fast, but rather something to climb the mountain for, something to personify via various images in order to learn from, deal with internally, then shape into something useful in the world as a result, or else let it go back down to dust. In a cohesive life, rage is not a stand-alone item. It is a substance waiting for our transformative efforts. The cycle of rage is like any other cycle; it rises, falls, dies and is released as new energy. Attention to the matter of rage begins the process of transformation.

Allowing oneself to be taught by one's rage, thereby transforming it, disperses it. One's energy returns to use in other areas, especially the area of creativity. Although some people claim they can create out of their chronic rage, the problem is that rage confines access to the collective unconscious - that infinite reservoir of imaginal images and thoughts - so that a person creating out of rage tends to create the same thing over and over again, with nothing new coming through. Untransformed rage can become a constant mantra about how oppressed, hurt and tortured we were...

...Rage corrodes our trust that anything good can occur. Something has happened to hope. And behind the loss of hope is usually anger; behind anger, pain; behind pain, usually torture of one sort or another, sometimes recent, but more often from long ago.

In physical post-trauma work, we know that the sooner injury is dealt with, the less its effect spread or worsen. Also the more quickly a trauma is contained and dealt with, the faster the recovery time. This is true for psychological trauma as well. What condition would we be in if we'd broken a leg as a child, and thirty years later it still had not been properly set?

...There is a life beyond thoughtless rage...it takes a conscious practice to contain and heal such. But we can do it. It truly takes only climbing through one step at a time.

So rather than trying to "behave" and not feel our rage or rather than using it to burn down every living thing in a hundred-mile radius, it is better to first ask rage to take a seat with us, have some tea, talk a while so we can find out what summoned this visitor. At first rage...it doesn't want to talk, it doesn't want to eat, just wants to sit there and stare, or rail, or be left alone. It is this critical point that we call the healer, our wisest self, our best resources for seeing beyond ego irritation and aggravation. The healer is always the "far-seer." She is the one who can tell us what good can come from exploring this emotive surge."

Sunday, July 17

"Creativity is a shapechanger. One moment it takes this form, the next that. It is like a dazzling spirit who appears to us all, yet is hard to describe for no one agrees on what they saw in that brilliant flash...Some say the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing. It seems in most instances to be a simple being. It is not virtuosity, although that is very fine in itself. It is the love of something, having so much love for something - whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity --- that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. It is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must."

Saturday, July 16

A strange day, stranger than most perhaps. I woke up before sunrise. I prayed. I meditated. I stretched. I breathed.

She saw him from a distance. She saw him for a moment and sensed the blue melancholy of his soul in anguish, tormented.

A strange day, stranger than most perhaps.

She received a message from him. Impersonal. Brief. Cold. Sterile. Dry. Mechanical. Alien. Bland. Forced. She understood it was not actually from him...

A strange day, stranger than most perhaps. I asked for insight:

"The Fool. Orpheus emerges unsuccessful and howling from the Underworld. A new journey of immense significance and success is about to begin, though he does not know this yet. Orpheus' trip to and from the Underworld - and beyond - is the Fool's journey. Life itself is the Fool's journey as we, like Orpheus, choose and lose, risk and gain, guess and fail, try and succeed. We take risks so we can truly live. Orpheus demonstrates living with a genuine love and intensity for life - regardless of the result.

Wednesday, July 13

"The Australian Aborigines believe that two separate realities exist: that of everyday life, and that of the dreamtime, the timeless realm from which energy beings (the gods) first sung the world into existence. The dreamtime is the domain of song and poetry, of symbols and archetypes; the shamans believe that it's the more important of the two realities, for it births, shapes, and forms the physical world. They'd probably agree with Einstein, who said, 'Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.'

In our own culture, we've come to value our waking reality so much that we've forgotten our power to conceive from the invisible world of the dreamtime and co-create with the universe."

- Alberto Villoldo

from childhood I learned that I could receive messages through dreams...

ideas for my artwork and poetry often originate in vivid, detailed dreams...

Tuesday, July 12

"Look, I don't ask much, just your hand, to hold it...I need that door you gave me for coming into your world, that little chunk of green sugar, of a lucky ring. Can't you just spare me your hand tonight at the end of a year of hoarse-voiced-owls? You can't for technical reasons. So I weave it in the air, warping each finger, the silky peach of the palm and the back, that country of blue trees. That's how I take it and hold it, as if so much of the world depended on it..."

Friday, July 8

"There is no way you can live a creative life until you tap into the arrogance of belonging...Let us all find our authentic, creative legs to stand on. Roots deep in the ground and not to be blown about by criticism (our own or others). It is our divine innermost conversation that matters. The intercourse with creator and willing mind where works of art come to life."

Thursday, July 7

"For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive."

Tuesday, July 5

"...but even so, just as he starts to leave, when he notices a bit of dirt under his thumbnail, he stops to scrub it out. Although she has never complained at all about his grubby appearance whenever he came in tired from the digs and sat drinking with her, she might feel differently now that she is going to take him upstairs.

He is glad to see the show again because it gives him time to anticipate and dream, to build up to a private finale. Though he doesn't fool himself. She has to have known for a while how much he thinks of her, and yet, kind as she always was when he told her all his troubles, he knows she has another regular man, more sophisticated, more of her world. As one more time he watches the extraordinary grace with which she dances, all that gauzy fabric whirling around her, his longing has a different quality now that he knows his desire will soon be met...

...But it is not just the mechanics of what she does that impressed him. He has all he longed for now, even what he never quite understood before that he wanted. It is not just that she had made him happy. He is laughing to find himself lighter than air. And she has given him a deeper pleasure, too; as if reaching into the center of who he is, she has mined the gold that was deep inside."

Friday, July 1

"There is something that matters more than any of those things and that is finding the essence of who you are beyond that short-lived entity, that short-lived personalized sense of self. You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level..."

- Eckhart Tolle

snapshot - I began reading excerpts from "Stillness Speaks" to baby during our days by the sea because I forgot to bring any of her books...

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C A S I M I R A

Brief Bio

CASIMIRA grew up surrounded by art and storytelling with music and poetry playing a part of everyday life. She developed a fascination for textiles and clay since early childhood.

An educational background in art history and romance languages served as inspiration when CASIMIRA began creating poetic wearable pieces from wire, vintage beads and objets trouvés. She has studied in Europe and Latin America and is continuously diving into studio art courses. Private collectors may be found in Europe, Latin America, Australia, Asia, Canada and throughout the United States.

She believes in the healing power of nature, meditates under moonlight and wishes upon stars. She treasures old love letters, dreams of publishing her mountain of journals and of one day living by the sea...

When not painting, sculpting or writing, CASIMIRA is reading, playing with crystals and stones, practicing yoga, volunteering for favorite non-profits and dancing dreams into realities with her best friends and soul mates - her husband and their young children.